Remnants of the Precursors Succession Game?

[RefSteel]

Sounds like a wide consensus. Fenn, if you're in favor of rerolling too and are willing/able to play the first 20 turns of a new game, I'd say go for it! Then if you roll us a near-corner start with a back-lines poor minimal 30 three parsecs away and two empty asteroid fields at the only other stars within six parsecs, we can all get wistful about the start Brian rolled and convince ourselves it wasn't too much to play....

[EDIT: Also, Ray F or anyone else who knows - is there a way, either during game setup or during the course of play, to change/select the colors displayed for the rival empires in a given game?]

[Ray F]

[EDIT:  Also, Ray F or anyone else who knows - is there a way, either during game setup or during the course of play, to change/select the colors displayed for the rival empires in a given game?]

Yes, of course. On the Races UI, there is a listing of your known opponents on the right (your empire is at the top of the list). For each, there is a colored icon. Click on that on you'll get to change colors.

Another neat feature is, from your military intelligence screen where you can see enemy ship designs, you can rename those designs to your liking.

Also on the planet's listing, you can add a comment for each system.

Also, you can turn on a colored flag for each system on the map. I find this extremely useful when organizing what I want to do for particular systems.

[Fenn]

Whew, a lot's happened since I checked in last. Definitely agree with putting this save on ice until and unless we get stomped by the AI in a new run.

I'll roll a new start and play the 20 turns today.

[haphazard1]

Good luck, Fenn! Get us off to a good (but not quite so utopian ) start.

[Fenn]

New timeline is a go! Hopefully my management is up to par...

Here we are with our new game. I realized I forgot to say anything about our galaxy's shape in the list of settings, so I went with an Ellipse 1 with Void 1 - nothing too weird, but it should provide a different experience to the usual MOO1 starfields.


Each race has its own origin story in this game - this is the Ssslaura's. It's a cute feature, but after the first time I usually skip past this flavour text. Anyway, let's get to the game proper!


We open to a favourable arrangement of stars - a yellow, an orange and two reds all within colony ship reach, and five more systems within scouting range.


Zooming out, we can confirm our position on the very bottom of the ellipse. With this galaxy shape there generally aren't any corners to be stuck in, so starting position is mostly a question of star density - I'm glad we aren't starting in the top-center for instance. We have some yellow stars to our north-northwest and northeast that could house AI homeworlds, but none to our direct west, so we're not in great danger of being boxed in early.


In any case, I begin by sending our colony ship to the yellow star to the southwest. It only opens up two more stars for exploration (the white star to its west is 3.1 parsecs away from it), but I figure getting a strong second planet is the most important thing to shoot for. The two scouts start heading north, and I spend a turn of production building three more, which should be plenty for now. After that, we swap to building factories on Sssla until turn 4...


...When we discover four planets simultaneously. Heralth is where our colony ship went and it was definitely the right place to go, looking at the quality of the other three planets. Rinnenth is small and opens up no new space and the remaining two are uninhabitable.


We of course found the colony right away. I'm not clear on the optimal way to seed colonies with population transports, but Sssla has 64/100 pop so I send 18 colonists to Heralth on turn 4 and four more the turn after. Otherwise, Sssla is going to keep building factories until we can get the build time of the colony ship down to eight turns' worth.


Turn 7 greets us with the discovery of our second Steppe planet - sadly out of range for now, and the size could be better, but at least it's not another hostile environment. Turn 8 sees three more planet discoveries: a size 85 Jungle planet in the northeast, a 50 Desert in the west, and the white star just out of colony range of Heralth turns out to be Barren anyway.


By Turn 9, we have the immediate vicinity scouted, adding a size 45 Steppe (Garuga) in the northwest and a 50 Desert (Mesarth) in the northeast. I've marked the 40-60 size planets with white flags, Tessith the size 85 Jungle with green, and the hostile planets with red. We're going to need range upgrades; Range 5 would open up a great deal, but even Range 4 would help - we could send a colony ship to Valstrath via Heralth and thereby unlock Garuga and Jeruth as well. The blue planet is unknown for the time being; later our scout there finds it's another Inferno world, and so not relevant to us just yet.

On Turn 11 Sssla starts building an 8-turn colony ship for Rinnenth and I put a tick of spending into tech. Computing and Construction had the full selection; Planetology offered up Improved Terraforming +10 and Improved Eco Restoration, but not Controlled Barren which could have been handy for colonizing Parath. Weapons has just Hyper-Vs, and the all-important Propulsion offers...Hydrogen Fuel Cells for Range 4. Well, it'll have to do. For the time being I put all tech spending into Planetology and Propulsion, not that there's much to spend while Sssla works on the Colony Ship.

The next few turns are spent witing until the game startles me with diplomatic contact:


It's the Meklons! Honourable Industrialist isn't the worst personality to deal with, but this is a little early for contact.


Their scout turned up on Garuga, the size 45 Steppe in the top-left of known space. That could be bad news if they're close enough to colonize it somehow. Their homeworld must be at one of these two yellow stars, which puts them pretty close to us.

The Colony Ship finishes at last on Turn 19, and I send it to Rinnenth as planned; next is to turn on tech and make a run for Hydrogen Fuel Cells.


Rinnenth's colony is founded right on Turn 21, marking the end of my turnset. Overall, we're in a decent position with good scope to expand, but the early appearance of the machines could pose problems down the road. We've had no alien contacts to our northeast but it's hard to say whether that's due to the lack of empires in that direction or if they simply haven't settled towards us yet.

Save's right here for whoever wants it (just make sure to unzip it first!)

  RSG-01-01.zip (Size: 48.52 KB / Downloads: 3)

[Brian Shanahan]

Interesting start, we need range 4 to start colonising planets (it should cover the three planets to the west), so I would definitely prioritise that. After that it looks like we need environmental colonisation techs to break out further. I'd personally put more to propulsion than planetology.

[haphazard1]

Looks like a promising start, Fenn. What did you pick in Planetology?

Contact already with the cyborgs (or are they pure machines in RotP?) this early is a bit worrying. We should certainly prioritize getting that group of stars to our NW colonized. Since they have scouted Garuga, they will likely be moving to grab it if they have the range. We could attempt a blockade, but it would take long range fuel tanks which means it would be pretty expensive. We are probably better off just pushing range tech and col ships. If they can get there without fuel tanks, we would not be able to hold them off the planet anyway.

How far away is Mesarth? It looks like range 4 will be not quite enough. That is a problem, as we will need either more range or a LR col ship to reach that nice jungle world.

[Fenn]

I picked Improved Eco Restoration, thinking that our planets were unlikely to get to cap soon and we mostly had decently high sizes already, but again I'm not an expert so I'm not certain I made the right decision there.

Mesarth's 4.6 away from Sssla and 4.4 from Rinnenth, so indeed it's going to need LR ships or a higher-tier range upgrade to reach. Both of the intermediary planets being hostile makes things a lot more difficult. I left tech with a 60/40 split on Propulsion/Planetology so hopefully Range 4 is not long in arriving.

[haphazard1]

Improved Eco is a solid choice. It will save us BCs on cleanup for the rest of the game, and that adds up over time. Really any of the initial tier of Planetology are good choices if you have a barren world in reach, otherwise avoid the barren colony tech.

You mention not being sure on the best way of seeding new planets. Fortunately we are the lizards. Our racial bonus to pop growth makes just about anything work, as long as we send at least some starter pop. And Sssla will grow back fast, so we can afford to send a good number.

Who wants to take the save next? I could play tomorrow if no one wants to take it sooner, but I should also have time later in the week. Feel free to post a got it if you want to/can play sooner.

[Dp101]

Everything sounds like it went well, and I approve of the usage of flags lol. I've never bothered with them in singleplayer but in an SG context they'll be nice. Looking at the save, only alternative in planetology was terraforming +10 so definitely glad we went with improved eco, though with just the one barren world I'm unsure how impactful controlled barren would have been anyway.

Though speaking of tech options, I only just realised poking around the save to check things that you can actually see the options in every field even before you put in research. Computers has all 3 options open to us, construction also has both, shields is shields, and weapons only has hyper-Vs. A bountiful selection!

I can play anytime so I don't have strong preferences on when to take my turns, I only downloaded the save to take a look and not necessarily to play.